Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday February 29, 2012 @11:50AM
from the higher-availability-through-cloud-computing dept.

New submitter dcraid writes with a quote from El Reg: "Microsoft's cloudy platform, Windows Azure, is experiencing a major outage: at the time of writing, its service management system had been down for about seven hours worldwide. A customer described the problem to The Register as an 'admin nightmare' and said they couldn't understand how such an important system could go down. 'This should never happen,' said our source. 'The system should be redundant and outages should be confined to some data centres only.'"
The Azure service dashboard has regular updates on the situation. According to their update feed the situation should have been resolved a few hours ago but has instead gotten worse: "We continue to work through the issues that are blocking the restoration of service management for some customers in North Central US, South Central US and North Europe sub-regions. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers." To be fair, other cloud providers have had similar issues before.

Since the image that "Azure" and "Cloud" conjurs up is more "sky" than "cloud" it would be my suggestion that Microsoft simply register chickenlit.tl and set up an Azure service status monitor/report page there.

They could have an adorable cartoon chicken that, when the system is working normally, runs around scratching and pecking(speed dependent on load). When downtime occurs, it would begin squawking about how the sky is falling. What could make failure more endearing?